It’s official - Microsoft just offered to buy Yahoo for US$44.6 billion to compete with Google, sending Yahoo shares up 54% and Google down 10% in pre-market trading. I’d thought of blogging tomorrow after a long hiatus, but simply couldn’t pass up on this huge, huge news. If this deal goes through, we’ll have a two-horse race with Google controlling 60% of the search market while the combined Microsoft-Yahoo controls 33%. The move is not surprising considering Google’s continued dominance and with online ad spend expected to hit US$80 billion by 2010. Looks like it’s going to be an interesting year for search engine marketing. :) Details here. Update 10 Feb: Yahoo has rejected the offer because the bid is deemed ‘too low’.
